The cooling system works great.....The Nitrogen system does it's job really well too , it was impressive to see the pump totally frost free while just above it the valve was covered.hopefully there's some pics of that....And the vacuum dewar works as well....

We did'nt get the computer part to work , but that's gonna be part of the learning process from here on in.

The are some observations I/we made about the machines operation . Here's a few :

-The top assembly that holds the mobo / provides the vent lines , Is really clunky , it doesnt work well , for several reasons...I will be redoing it.

-Along the same line , the 'umbilical' that provides I/O/power/etc , is a pita....it needs to instantly disconnect to make changeovers easier.

-Balls of masking tape do not pump well.

-The amount of dissolved co2 in the Iso is enough the seriously degrade the pumps operation.This can and will be fixed.

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Any other observations from people that were there , let's hear em.

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Dean,Rob,John,Nick really good work doing all the mobo testing !
And really , thanks to everyone that attended , everybody helped out , a true team effort......thanks a lot , hope yah had fun !

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As to the coolant : it's either conductivity , or capacitance thats the issue , I'll be doing some testing later in the week .

For the moment I'm gonna take a break , it was a hectic 2 weeks prior.I do have to clean up a bit , theres dead motherboards all over the place.... but thats about all I'll be doing for a few days.

There are more pics , but they'll go into the gallery section post.....

A couple people have inquired about the possiblity of issues other than conductivity/capacitance......I'll run through a brief synopsis of what happened , and the tests we ran.
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Once the setup was complete , I filled the tank with Iso , and started the pump....It did not pump well for some reason , and after a while It choked out a small ball of masking tape....so the pump was shut shut off and the tape removed.Upon restart , the pump was back to normal.

So we tried the first post of the computer.No joy.

I discovered to my horror that I had mistakenly connected the battery to the power switch leads , and assumed that I had killed the motherboard.We would later discover that this was not the case.....

At this point Rob and John stepped up and ran off to memory express and bought two more motherboards.Thanks again !!

So we put the new p5k-SE in and hit the button...At this point it actually posted , but we had monitor issues and didn't see it....we did however witness light 'boiling' of the Iso around the naked CPU.Very cool...we shut down to address the monitor issue , but it would not post again.

So we dried off the mobo's , and tested them dry.....The first p5k was actually fine...so the battery issue did'nt hurt it.......Back into the tank , hit the button , no joy.

2nd mobo went back in after verification of dry post.....hit the button , still no luck..

Now , it's important to be aware that at this point it's warm Iso , dry ice has not even entered the picture yet.....

We then stopped using the thinktank , and started liquid testing in a baking pan.We tried Iso a couple more times..no luck , we then tried distilled water...no luck....the motherboards always worked once dry tho......

During the lunchbreak , HaDeS came up with the idea of selectively testing various areas of the motherboards with Iso to narrow down the problem.2 points bud !

So Dean,Rob,John and Nick started a rapid-fire succession of mobo teardown/rebuilds that was cool to watch....I decided to test run the cooling system and burn up the dry ice.

The result of the mobo tests was that nothing error'd until the Iso interacted around the CPU...great work guys !

To my great delight , the thinktank cooling system etc worked damn near flawlessly , although we ran outta dry ice at -50c....

So thats the story...as you can see mechanical stresses and thermal shock were not the issue.

Heh i could have told you that bout distilled water if you had asked me, actually did an experiment back in first year chem (or was it physics) at university where we were testing the conductivity of different liquids and to some people's surprise, distilled water was still relatively conductive.